I was reading a discussion on qt vs gtk. and someone raise the question what will happen to KDE once trolltech is sold or bankrupted, and the reply he got was, in case of sold out or bankruptcy the latest version of qt will be released under BSD license. But how is that going to help KDE. Who is going to maintain qt then? KDE folks are responsible for maintaining and developing KDE not qt.

Well, first of all, QT is already open source. And, frankly, you face the same problem with any application or library. What happens with the current gtk maintainers get tired of maintaining it? Someone else will continue the project. And, I'm quite sure, the same will happen with QT. That's the great thing about open source software.

I was reading a discussion on qt vs gtk. and someone raise the question what will happen to KDE once trolltech is sold or bankrupted, and the reply he got was, in case of sold out or bankruptcy the latest version of qt will be released under BSD license. But how is that going to help KDE. Who is going to maintain qt then? KDE folks are responsible for maintaining and developing KDE not qt.

Scenarios:
a) Some Big fish will buy it, google, sun.... and will continue to develop it

b) someone will invent OpenQT

c) KDE can be rewritten to use GTK (very, very, very hard, but possible)

d) KDE will die, and there will be no more debates regarding Gnome vs KDE

And, frankly, you face the same problem with any application or library. What happens with the current gtk maintainers get tired of maintaining it? Someone else will continue the project. And, I'm quite sure, the same will happen with QT. That's the great thing about open source software.

Ye, and one of greatest examples i know is my favorite window manager fvwm

EDIT
from wikipedia:

Compromises were sought between KDE and Trolltech whereby Qt would not be able to fall under a more restrictive license than the QPL, even if Trolltech was bought out or went bankrupt. This led to the creation of the KDE Free Qt foundation, which guarantees that Qt would fall under a BSD-style license should no free software/open source version of Qt be released during 12 months.

The Q Public License (QPL) is a non-copyleft free software license created by Trolltech for its free edition of the Qt toolkit. It captures the general meaning of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), but is incompatible with it, meaning that you cannot legally distribute products derived from both GPL'ed and QPL'ed code. It was used until Qt 3.0, as Trolltech toolkit version 4.0 was released under GPL version 2.

I was reading a discussion on qt vs gtk. and someone raise the question what will happen to KDE once trolltech is sold or bankrupted, and the reply he got was, in case of sold out or bankruptcy the latest version of qt will be released under BSD license. But how is that going to help KDE. Who is going to maintain qt then? KDE folks are responsible for maintaining and developing KDE not qt.

d) KDE will die, and there will be no more debates regarding Gnome vs KDE

I'd hate to see KDE die, but it would be nice for no more Gnome vs KDE crap to turn up here and there - especially if it was Gnomes head on the chopping block >_>

As long as you use the correct license for your development needs, it's a tad hard to get screwed with Qt; imho.... the only bad thing is the price of a commercial license. Other then that, it's mostly an idiot proof deal.

If you really wanted to release GPL'd software that links to GPL-unfriendly-licensed code, all you have to do is state an exception in the license that you distribute your software with for that. It's not strict GPL at that point, but it works just fine.
As long as the code is your code, you can license it however you want - don't forget that important fact.